Interview with Ethan Loch

Interview with Ethan Loch, Scottish Pianist

In late November, I had the privilege of listening to and then reviewing a concert given by the RSNO in the Usher Hall as part of its subscription series. The main work of the evening was the orchestral suite from Tchaikovsky’s ballet, ‘Swan Lake’, but I was fascinated to see so many young people in the audience, and wondered why? It was unlikely to be an influx of ballet fans under the age of 30, and so there had to be another reason. The main work in the first half of the programme was Beethoven’s youthful 1st Piano Concerto, but it was the soloist they had flocked to see. The 20-year-old Scottish pianist, Ethan Loch, was booked to play, and the fantastic reception at the end of the concerto was testimony to his star quality. His virtuosity combined with a rare musical sensibility was fabulous, but it was the fact that Ethan has been blind from birth that gives him the magic touch. How can it be possible that someone who cannot see his instrument, or indeed the hall in which he is playing, can perform to the highest level of artistry? The audience was enchanted, and when Ethan played two encores of his own composition, during which he had asked the management to dowse the auditorium lights to allow us to imagine what his dark world is like, it was clear to me that this young man is quite a phenomenon. There is no suggestion of a patronising attitude here, no feeling that we are sorry for his blindness and need to make allowances for his playing. He is a supreme artist already, and I was determined to see if we could have an interview with him for the Edinburgh Music Review.

Et voilà!

BBS: Welcome to the Edinburgh Music Review, Ethan. Your biography is fascinating to read and I was hoping you could fill in the details for us. You were born in Blantyre in South Lanarkshire in 2004, contracted bacterial meningitis and then Leber Congenital Amaurosis soon after birth, and lost all sight. You then moved to Vancouver in Canada, only returning to Scotland at the age of five, having started learning piano from the age of eighteen months and formally by the Suzuki method from 4 years, a method taught by your mother, Larinda.

You were home-schooled by your parents at primary level, started to compose, and worked hard at the piano, all obviously by ear. Can you tell us more about this extraordinary childhood, how the piano playing came about, and how you developed as a young boy without sight?

EL: Thanks for having me! Some small corrections. Leber’s Congenital Amaurosis is a genetic condition I was born with. It affects the DNA that is used to grow retinal cells and my code is defective and produces retinal cells that can’t detect any light. I’ve been blind with no light perception since birth. I did contract bacterial meningitis at age ten weeks, but it doesn’t have anything to do with me being blind. However, as part of the care for babies with meningitis they check eye-response for possible brain damage, and it was then they noticed that I was blind!

My life in Vancouver was wonderful, I was in my own world most of the time collecting sounds and experiences. I was quite the adventurous child, exploring everywhere I could get to. Climbing the outside of the stairs over the banister, I’d climb over the top of the car and sit on the roof when no-one was looking. I enjoyed speed and that sense of the motion of extreme movements like roller coasters. I used to climb onto the fence in the back garden and launch myself onto my trampoline, until my mum noticed and stopped me. I did actually break a pinkie finger doing that so it was not safe.

As a piano teacher, my mum always had pianos in the house. Also, lots of musical instruments for group classes. Music was always present either classical from my mum or rock from my dad. I loved musical DVDs, although I’m not sure where my dad found them. My favourite was Horowitz in Vienna, a wonderful 1987 recording of that piano great in concert and I was enthralled by both the vibrations of Horowitz’s playing but also the response of the crowd!

It wasn’t just that though, I had DVDs of ballet, opera, flute, popular music but mostly lots and lots of classical piano.

It was Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata (the slow first movement) that really started to connect me to harmony. As Beethoven moved step by step into different keys, it gave me that foundation I could use to start exploring harmony. This opened up a whole new area of exploration for me where I could experiment and start to find my own voice.

BBS: At the age of 12, you started piano lessons with Simon Bottomley in Manchester and you were also taught Echolocation by Daniel Kish, to help you walk safely and avoid obstacles. These experiences and guidance sound crucial to your development both as a boy and a musician. Can you expand on what all this involved?

EL: It all came down to increasing my focus and discipline. I realised that in order to do what I wanted to do at the piano, I needed to step up and improve in all the technical aspects that a young pianist requires. My brain was so far ahead of my fingers that it was beginning to frustrate me. Somehow my mother found Simon Bottomley in Manchester and he seemed like a very good fit for teaching me those exact things! It was exceptionally hard driving from Bonnybridge to Manchester every Tuesday but we did it. We would set out in the morning, I would do school work in the car on the 5 hour drive, we would have a three hour lesson, grab a carvery dinner before driving the 5 hours home! It was fiercely painful, both to the fingers and the attention span, but it paid off.

Daniel Kish teaches all elements of blind navigation: cane use, general awareness, echolocation. Anything that will help me position myself in real space. We had lots of success in cane use, and general awareness but it was always difficult for me to come back to reality and the physical world I live in. I am very much in my own head and in my own world. I also get so distracted with the musical elements of sound that I find it very difficult to use sound for echolocation. There is a tremendous amount of discipline required for me to suppress my need to pitch everything and instead turn that sound into physical positioning information that I can use to find my way about.

I learned a great deal from both Simon and Daniel.

BBS: You spent a year in 2015 at St Mary’s Music School in Edinburgh, which I visited last year to do an interview and found fascinating. How was that experience, and what was it like suddenly being surrounded by other young musicians? Did you have a specially designed course? Your studies continue now at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, under Fali Parvi. How is that developing? Are you working on your technique or exploring repertoire, or both? Are you studying other instruments? I know you learn music aurally, by listening to multiple recordings. I do that myself when I am learning a role, but spend a lot of time on my own, working on tempi and texts, so I can make the performance my own. If you have to rely on aural learning, how hard is it to come up with your own interpretation?

EL: St Mary’s was a real time of journeying out into the wider world. I am somewhat unusual, both in being blind but also in the way I learn music. St Mary’s was a time where I could see up close different people doing different things musically, choristers, non-pianists (heaven forbid!) and people reading and analysing a score. For me music is sound, this translation of sound into written form has always been a bit of mystery.

Working with Fali has been a wonderful experience. He has many really important traits as a teacher. He is extremely articulate, he can explain a concept in a very clear, concise way because he has a very direct and intelligent way of thinking. He is extremely collaborative, I don’t disappear into nothing in his lessons, he brings the real me out, time and time again. He is very aware of the student’s needs, be that fingering or posture or repertoire, he’s always bringing out the student’s voice. Obviously, he has this wealth of experience to draw from but more than just that he has this great “fatherly instinct” that goes well beyond the piano and music. I’ve kayaked on a Loch with my piano teacher!

As for building a piece of music by ear, I’ve never been very good at mimicking. Even as a young child, I would try and gestalt a piece. Teasing out the essence of it and then I would play an approximation of it. It was the need to drill down and get the details correct that I found difficult. This is part of what Simon taught me. That details matter. For example, even as a young child playing Beethoven’s Moonlight, it was my version of it. Only later did I start to appreciate the need to bring more of what Beethoven wanted to the piece. Now, as I study the history and details of a piece, I am more aware of where my own tendencies to wander are appropriate and where it is best to stick to the score.

BBS: You do a lot of composing yourself. Is that mainly piano music or are you writing bigger works for larger resources?

EL: I have been writing piano works since I was very young. It is the most accessible way for me to get my musical ideas out of my head. Getting those ideas down on paper is surprisingly difficult and very time consuming. I just performed my first piano quintet in Manchester with players from Camerata and the RNCM and it was wonderful. The process of producing all the scores was exhausting but I work with a very talented transcriber Matthew Dickman, who takes the notes from inside my head and puts them into a score. He is a talented orchestrator and composer in his own right and we have developed a really good working relationship.

I also have a complete journey of my first piano concerto (piano part and orchestral reduction) down on paper, but I have to flesh out all the orchestral parts. I am working on that this year.

I have some ideas for a piano and dance suite that I’m trying to make happen this year as well.

My problem is the time it takes to extract all the ideas from my head and get it down on paper at a finished level. It is easy to get a rough outline down but getting a finished piece is tricky.

I have another couple of ideas for piano solo albums that are fairly far along the process, but I need to spend the time getting them finished.

BBS: You had a big success at the BBC Young Musician in 2022, winning the keyboard section and appearing in the Grand Finale. Was that the catalyst to your meteoric rise since then, and your current busy schedule of performances. You’re still only 20 or 21 and have a long career ahead of you. How do you see that developing?

EL: There was a tremendous amount of work that came directly out of that performance. However, it was a long and hard road to get there. There was a great deal of uncertainty with Covid and at any stage it could have all been cancelled. So, by the time I got to play, there was just this huge sense of relief that I got through the process. Although competitions suit my character well and I really enjoy the jolt that comes from that single minded focus of striving towards a singular goal, I am uncomfortable with the judging element of competitions. I heard so many wonderful performances from other artists who didn’t get through. It could be a bad note here, or a loose interpretation there and then, because subjective critique of art is so difficult, they miss out. I have no plans to do any more competitions. I get far more satisfaction from connecting with audiences or collaborating with other musicians.

That said, I get many opportunities to perform because people first saw me on BBC Young Musician and I am very grateful for the experience.

One thing that people may not understand, is that for a classical pianist so much of my early career is learning new repertoire! There is just so much music to learn. Even with just piano concertos, I’m doing Rachmaninov 3 then 2, Beethoven 2 through 5 to complete the set, Gershwin, and believe it or not, I have to learn my own piano concerto because it is quite tricky! This is on top of chamber pieces and solo piano works. It really is a privilege to have such a wide range of music to explore but overwhelming at times.

BBS: I suppose it must get a bit boring always having to talk about your blindness, and I am very conscious that I don’t want to get into a discussion where your lack of sight takes us away from your skill and prowess as a fine musician. However, you have spoken very openly about this aspect of your life, and it’s obviously a crucial part of who you are. Can you give us some idea what it is like to spend a life without seeing, and whether you can ever get away from that? For example, can you see light changes? One assumes all is dark, but maybe there is a lot of light, which is not focussed clearly. I can’t imagine what it is like. How do you get through a day? How much can you do on your own, and how much help do you need? What sort of social life can you have, and how do you relax? I can read, I can watch TV or films, I can walk in the country, I can go to art galleries. Presumably, all or at least most of that is unavailable to you. I presume you are getting these questions aurally and are replying into a machine which turns your words into writing.

EL: I am blind, without light perception. It’s called, NLP (no light perception) in either eye. They hooked me up to a brain wave machine and monitored me for any response to light and it was completely flat. This is actually quite unusual. So my world is dark, but I don’t ever process it as dark. I “see” all the colours and flavours of reality through sound. My image of the world is auditory-only but it isn’t missing those other parts because it never had them in the first place. It has always been auditory-only (and tactile I guess). It is very hard for me to both describe how I process reality and really understand how other people process reality. I found things like windows (solid objects that somehow you can “see through”) to be a very strange concept indeed.

One of the benefits to being blind in this modern age, is technology! I love technology. There have been such great advancements in technology for blind people. I have multiple computers, both dedicated Braille note-takers and normal laptops with screen reader technology and a Braille screen for doing long form text. I have a ridiculous number of voice recorders! I also have a smart speaker where I listen to a ridiculous number of audiobooks! I recently purchased Meta Ray-Ban glasses, but they are disabled for all the features I would use because of EU regulations. I am hoping they sort it out soon because the stereo sound is actually pretty good from the glasses. While at St Mary’s I read all the Harry Potter books in Braille on my Braille Notetaker.

Most of my casual communication is done via my iPhone, which has accessible technology for the blind built in and it is generally very good.

BBS: Finally, Ethan, I must say that I am in awe of what you have done in your life so far, and it was clear at that concert in the Usher Hall that your story has touched many people, and that you have already amassed a strong following. How do you foresee the future both as a pianist and a composer? What are your goals? I assume you have a strong management team who deal with all the tedious aspects of a musician’s life. Even for sighted performers, one needs people to tackle the nitty-gritty, to allow us to achieve something artistic. Where do you see yourself at 30, or 40?

As a musician who has just entered his 70th year, I am conscious now of looking back rather than ahead, but you have much to look forward to!

EL: Right now I am very deliberately taking the time to enjoy each of these new experiences. I am meeting so many interesting people and my world gets wider and wider each time I go to a new city and play to a new set of people. I love to meet people afterwards and hear a little bit about what is going on in their lives.

For a solo pianist, it is really good when I get to work with other musicians. This doesn’t happen as much with pianists as does with an orchestral instrumentalist. So, I am loving the concerto experience. Each conductor has shown me a different aspect of music, which has helped me grow as a musician. Every orchestra is different, they have a very different feel to them. I love being embedded or enveloped in that wall of sound from all the other musicians. Sometimes it feels as if I am being swept away, into a more tranquil state of being. I aim to do that as much as I possibly can!

Working with the quintet was great in a different way, much more personal and intimate. It was more like a dialogue between a close group of musicians. I want to collaborate with more people and experience more music.

As a composer, I want to finish my first piano concerto. To hear my music played by such a large group of musicians is bound to be exhilarating. I really need to get some of these pieces of music out of my head to make room for new ideas. I’d like to get to my fourth piano concerto out there (based on owls!) and then go back to my second piano concerto where I have some more experimental ideas using jazz riffs and an improvised solo piano section.

I don’t want to lose touch with my solo piano compositions though. I am still writing regularly. Expressing my thoughts through melody and harmony on the piano.

I need to start recording as well.

 In fact, I have so many things I want to do “right this instant” that it is overwhelming. So, I just choose the next project and focus on that.

Although, I am never only working on one thing at a time. My brain requires me to go all over the place and explore. This isn’t great for someone sitting exams, but it is great for creativity.

Age 30 is nine and half years from now, and that just seems impossibly far away. I don’t think I have the kind of brain that can think that far out.

All I know is that I want to be playing music in new and exciting places and meeting music lovers from all over the world. I want to share this thing that I love with everybody I meet.

Photo credit: Julie Broadfoot